September 5 saw payments-giant, Visa, announced that it would expand its stablecoin settlement capabilities to high-speed layer-1 blockchain, Solana, causing a brief spike in the price of Solana’s native cryptocurrency, SOL. 

According to Cuy Sheffiled, Visa’s Head of Crypto, “By leveraging stablecoins like USDC and global blockchain networks like Solana and Ethereum, we're helping to improve the speed of cross-border settlement and providing a modern option for our clients to easily send or receive funds from Visa’s treasury… Visa is committed to being on the forefront of digital currency and blockchain innovation and leveraging these new technologies to help improve the way we move money.”

According to a press release, Visa has experienced “significant demand” for adding “newer, high performance blockchains” in order to aid with speed of execution, as well as transactional costs. It is interesting, therefore, that the payment giant opted for Solana, rather than an Ethereum-specific layer-2 scaling network, such as Optimism or Arbitrum.

The news has been largely well received by Solana’s community and SOL saw a sharp price increase to as much as $20.50 on the news. However, this has been followed by a dip, and the asset is currently trading at around $19.80, according to data from CoinMarketCap.

Visa’s announcement will no doubt compound excitement in the run-up to Solana’s headline in-person event, Breakpoint, which begins in late October.